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"Scientists have recently made some remarkable discoveries about non-human sounds. With the aid of digital bioacoustics - tiny, portable digital recorders similar to those found in your smartphone - researchers are documenting the universal importance of sound to life on Earth. By placing these digital microphones all over Earth, from the depths of the ocean to the Arctic and the Amazon, scientists are discovering the hidden sounds of nature, many of which occur at ultrasonic or infrasonic frequencies, above or below human hearing range. Non-humans are in continuous conversation, much of which the naked human ear cannot hear. But digital bioacoustics helps us hear these sounds, by functioning as a planetary-scale hearing aid and enabling humans to record nature's sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capacities. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers are now decoding complex communication in other species."

"Digital Sanctuaries, Manhattan is an urban soundwalk combining the original music of Electric Kulintang (Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez) with the visual art of Makoto Fujimura and interaction design by Shankari Murali. Built for both IOS and mobile web app, Digital Sanctuaries invites the public to alight on a virtual pilgrimage through the built environment of a cityscape, finding meditative spaces in unexpected places, marked by an ever-changing musical score. As the audience engages with the music in each place, they are encouraged to discover the hidden qualities of the world without while taking time to contemplate the world within."

"Artist Julianne Swartz presents a sound installation, Digital Empathy, which greets High Line visitors with a variety of messages. At some sites, computer-generated voices speak messages of concern, support, and love, intermingled with pragmatic information. In other sites, those same digitized voices recite poetry and sing love songs to park visitors."

"When did you last use radio technology? If you're straining to remember when you last turned on the AM/FM radio broadcast receiver in your car, you've probably gone too far back. Although it might not come to mind when we think about radio in the digital media era, things like GPS, wireless computer networks, and even our mobile phones use radio waves.  Far from being outdated, this century-old technology is still integral to much of what we do. "On the one hand, it's very ambient. We don't notice it," says Rick Prelinger, an archivist and professor emerit of film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "But radio is also deeply engaged with the world." "

"Digital Acoustic Cartography‹ is an interactive data visualization that transforms sonic events into a readable visual language. "

"Foundsoundscape was inspired by the very first Digital Radio station in the UK, that simply played a recording of a rural location. Radio you could just leave running to add a peaceful ambience to your environment indoors. It heralded a new media paradigm, as digital broadcasting offered more capacity than requred for the first time, and that space needed filling. At the same time on TV, Channel 4 was broadcasting Big Brother live 24hours, and at night I loved to tune-in my analogue TV sets all over the house, and the shed, so I could hear the housemates gently sleeping as I worked through the night. Since then infomercials, and gambling TV have taken over, and I greatly miss that sense of real-time space, that does not demand your attention. Foundsoundscape quietly underscores your environment, by creating new ones from others."

Bu Kim Cascone "With the advent of cheap digital recording gear, many have taken to recording their environments and presenting it as sound art. Without considering how technology leaches the soul of an environment, much of today's field recording based sound art will ultimately fail to capture the holistic nuance and subtleties found in nature. What this essay calls for is a resurrection and development of the post-digital aesthetic in the form of "Transcendigitalism.""

Immersive digital art works offering listeners an intimate, visceral and poetic glimpse of their own mortality. Afterlife is a series of four 20-minute (approx.) immersive digital artworks that transport the listener to places which paradoxically none of us will ever know: connecting us with stories of the body's decomposition after death."

"WIZARD APPRENTICE (pronouns: she and/or they) is a music producer, live performer, and video artist. As a highly sensitive introvert, her multimedia projects are strategies for managing an overwhelming world. Her music is a combination of lyrical precision, minimalistic composition, and technically-amateurish charm. She creates media that takes advantage of user-friendly technology, skipping time consuming learning curves to focus on inventing highly relatable language for subtle personal experiences. She's not a gear-head, rather, a digital folk artist who vividly and simplistically expresses her inner world using resourcefulness and honesty. Her video work incorporates green screen graphics, digital puppetry, and compositing to produce imagery that's cerebral, campy, and hypnotic. She combines song and video to create multimedia live performances that explore intimate emotional themes."

"I first heard about voice donation while listening to "Being Siri," an experimental audio piece about Erin Anderson donating her voice to Boston-based voice donation company, VocaliD. Like a digital blood bank of sorts, VocaliD provides a platform for donating one's voice via digital audio recordings."

"Overlaying a map with the sheet music for London Bridge is Falling Down, Scanner walked through London and made audio recordings on a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) machine and took digital photographs at the points where the musical notes fell on the map. The visual images were fed into a computer and translated into sound which Scanner mixed live with the DAT recordings."

"In their many (justified) laments about the trajectory of their profession in the digital age, songwriters and musicians regularly assert that music has been "devalued." Over the years they've pointed at two outstanding culprits. First, it was music piracy and the futility of "competing with free." More recently the focus has been on the seemingly miniscule payments songs generate when they're streamed on services such as Spotify or Apple Music."

"Provoking more noisy t(h)inkering in sound studies, digital humanities, and the audio arts."

"In an excerpt from his book The New Analog, Damon Krukowski looks at the aesthetics of noise in analog music-and what we've lost in the transition to digital recordings."

This interactive multimedia project historically and culturally situates hearing and listening in eighteenth-century Paris by re-imagining how we might present sonic artifacts to better understand auditioning subjects within pre-recording technology soundscapes. Through multiple pathways and thematic tags, the project simulates how Parisians would have interacted with the web of sonic knowledge that existed in eighteenth-century Paris. The project culls resources from across academic digital initiatives as well as popular, public platforms. This blend of sources puts into question stereotypical distinctions made between academic and public, scholarly and popular. Enjoy exploring Organs of the Soul through a choose-your-own-adventure format. And consider what constitutes your own unique auditory subjectivity.

"This extraordinarily inventive duo has a way of making music all their own. At the heart of their duo is a self-designed, cutting-edge digital cueing system which operates as a sometimes visible third member. Both prodding and reactive, the Shackle system suggests musical directions and textures to these two highly gifted performers, opening up a fascinating array of sonic choices for La Berge and van Heumen to play with and against. "

Craig Smith, has digitized and shared a 27GB collection of vintage sound effects. The sounds form three collections. They consist of high-quality, first generation copies of original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & '40s created for Hollywood studios. They were collected by a prominent sound editor who worked in the industry for 44 years. The fragile optical elements were donated to USC, and transferred to tape by USC Cinema students in the early 1970s. There are three collections: The Gold and Red Libraries (Gold effects start with "G", Red with "R") consist of high-quality, first generation copies of original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & '40s created for Hollywood studios. They were collected by a prominent sound editor who worked in the industry for 44 years. The fragile optical elements were donated to USC, and transferred to tape by USC Cinema students in the early 1970s. The Sunset Editorial (SSE) Library was also donated to USC around 1990. It includes classic effects from the 1930s into the '80s. These effects are from 35mm magnetic film. They were often several generations removed from the originals, and not as clean, so some careful restoration was done to make them more useful. SSE effects start with "S" About Craig Smith: "I have been recording, editing, & mixing sound since 1964, and teaching sound design and technology at California Institute of the Arts since 1986. In my spare time, I experiment with implied narrative and accidental sound design -- putting together sounds & images that have nothing to do with each other to create unexpected stories."

"What do you think we are not hearing? Can listening encourage us to challenge our assumptions, and change our behaviour and decision-making processes concerning our relations to non-human species? Can human opinions on invertebrates be shifted through listening? I have been developing a process for constructing synthesized "built" soundscapes of hidden sounds. Built Hidden Soundscape: Pipeline Road, Gamboa is a preliminary result from this research. I made the field recordings for this built soundscape while at the Digital Naturalism conference in Gamboa, Panama in August 2019. The video shows a scrolling image of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a bioacoustic tool that shows how sounds sit together in a soundscape. The Y axis represents frequency (Hz) and the X axis represents time. This spectrogram, however, focuses on 'hidden sounds' - sounds that cannot be heard by humans without the use of technology; sounds that are easily heard by human ears are excluded from this synthesized, artificial rendering of a soundscape. The sound work consists of field recordings from Pipeline Road in Gamboa, bookended by the dynamic dawn and dusk soundscapes of Pipeline Road. This built soundscape includes ultrasonic sounds (above the range of human hearing, played back at lower frequency), substrate-borne vibrations, and otherwise very quiet sounds. "

"Wayfindr, London's best shot at transport accessibility for the blind, was developed out of a couple's new year's resolution. Digital designer Umesh Pandya and his optometrist wife were looking at ways they could collaborate in 2014, while satisfying a deep-rooted desire to help blind people. "We wanted to help people living with sight loss," says Pandya, "My wife obviously deals with the diagnosis and prevention part of it, but I can't do the prevention because I'm not a scientist. I had an interest in accessibility work anyway, and I'm fascinated with the internet of things, connectivities, and exploring what happens when our interface disappears.""

"O'Daniel has worn hearing aids since she was 3. The ones she has now are digital, and sometimes they give her a heightened sense of sound: A car engine hum becomes earsplitting. Within daily experiences of frustration, and I do a lot of compensating, there's also this kind of radical, heightened attention," O'Daniel said. "And that mix, I find just fascinating. O'Daniel has spent most of her art career focused on recreating those jarring sounds.